August 12, 2009

It's my Dad's birthday and what a gift he's going to get, [he hates Microsoft] when he hears that Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has declared that Microsoft cannot sell a product called Microsoft Word.[via PC World]

I was always curious about how M$ got away with locking down their DOCX format from being edited by other software since it uses XML which is open to everyone.

For example, OpenOffice.org is able to open the DOCX format but once you edit it, you must save it in a different format. Microsoft apparently has 60 days to complie so that explains why MS Word is still for sale on their website. I personally recommend OpenOffice.org as an alternative for any of you that are/were looking to purchase Word after the next sixty days. It's free, smaller footprint, open source and runs on multiple platforms. It can do pretty much everything that Word and MS Office can do and, oh yeah, did I mention it's free?

So, does anyone have other alternatives to Word that they use, free or not? Leave a comment and let our readers know what options are out there!